


Where the Time Goes When It Isn't Here

by sophiagratia



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-24 12:29:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9726953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: A story about trauma anniversaries and love and repair in long time.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kathryne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/gifts).



> Triply dedicated to [kathryne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne), once for her beta, once for the material of hers that I've incorporated here, and once just cause. And thanks too to [ruby_powell](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ruby_powell) for being nice and cheerleading.
> 
>  **Content advisory** : this story deals with grief and trauma on the basis of the events of canon, including Gillian's history and the death of Kate McKenzie, and touches on substance abuse and suicidality. No violence is explicitly depicted.
> 
> The title is taken from Amelia Curran's song '[Years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVwWWU-0dsw)'.

* * *

It’s the second of April, and Caroline will spend the day with Gillian as she has done every year as long as she’s known her. This year is number six. It’s Easter Monday, and spring term has been over for three days. She and Gillian are six weeks shy of their fifty-second birthday, she’s eight years from retirement, and the age of her daughter and the time since the death of her wife are alike exactly five years and twenty-seven days. She has been awake in the dark for roughly ninety minutes, staring at the ceiling. Mornings like this inspire compulsive arithmetic. She knows Gillian’s been doing maths of her own. 

Flora bounces in at dawn as always, bounding into her bed, and it’s no longer hard to put on a histrionic grumble and then laugh and wrestle her into a hug. A few minutes later, Greg pokes his head in, and she can’t remember a time when it would have seemed strange for him to see her in knickers and a threadbare t-shirt. 

‘Brekkie?’ he asks with a dumb grin and finger guns. What a dipshit, she thinks, smiling at him lovingly. 

‘I should _fucking_ hope so!’ Flora enunciates, giving her sweet piping voice an emphasis identical to the tone in which Caroline has on occasion said those exact words to her mother. Caroline gasps, and she and Greg stare at each other for a long moment before Greg falls against the doorframe laughing, clapping a hand over his mouth and pointing at Caroline. Completely useless. 

‘Oh, shit,’ Caroline finally says, then claps a hand over her own mouth. 

‘You’re both ridiculous, the pair of you,’ Flora announces—‘ _Shit_ , it’s pitch-perfect,’ Greg wails, redfaced on the floor—before flouncing out of the room around him.

They shake their heads at each other for a moment longer before throwing up their hands and launching themselves into the day, Caroline into the shower and Greg, still giggling, downstairs to take charge of breakfast and, presumably, to give Flora the kind of talk about how to share space with other people that he’s peculiarly good at, given it’s a skill he’s barely mastered himself.

He makes sure she eats, and he and Flora regale her with their plans for the day, which involve forbidden sweets and embarking on a new episode of their bear-superhero comic _Brunhilde the Bewildering_ , the plot of which has gotten so outrageous that Caroline’s clarifying queries are no longer disingenuous. Flora seems entirely unfazed by the idea of her spending twenty-four hours elsewhere, an abrupt if welcome change from a whole winter of never willingly letting Caroline out of her sight. Greg smiles a reassuringly steady smile at her, nods, and with an odd kind of gravity, winks. She does feel better. He feeds her, and he makes her laugh, and he helps her load the absurd amount of groceries she’s bought into the Jeep. He catches her in a tight hug before she goes, and he holds on long enough to make her let herself feel held.

‘You’re a good egg, Cazza,’ he says, and kisses her forehead.

‘And you’re a dipshit,’ she says, swatting him, and climbs into the car. He blows her a kiss and bows elaborately. She waves as she pulls out of the drive. She’d be lost without him.

* * *

The first time, it hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d known Eddie’d died on the first of April; she’d spent the time since Gillian had told her that doing everything she could not to make the kind of joke for which Gillian’d be justified in never speaking to her again. She wasn’t likely to forget. But it really hadn’t occurred to her, that first time. Kate had died not a month since. She was alone in her vast empty house with an inconsolable colicky newborn that she could only half think of as hers, and it just happened that the moment when she reached the very end of her capacity fell on the morning of the second of April. She staved it off as long as she could. She tried and failed to eat a meal, to shower. She got Flora fed and changed, and that was the best she could do. She lay in her bed with her, trying to soothe her. Talking to her dead wife. Sometime around eleven o’clock, in her thirty-fifth hour without sleep and at a total loss, she put Flora in the car and drove the hour and change to Ripponden. Flora slept the whole way.

She found Gillian passed out on her settee, Gillian who never slept past seven out cold at half noon, and a stunning array of bottles on the floor. That was the last straw. Before very long it’d be a source of deep shame to her that her first response had not been concern for Gillian, but in that moment some selfish childish frightened thing inside her that had blindly struck out for comfort broke down upon not finding it. She sat down in the doorway, clutching the baby, and sobbed. And Flora just gurgled and snored against her chest, which seemed too cruel to bear. She wailed when Caroline most coddled and comforted her, and slept serenely through Caroline’s acutest distress. How could they be so alien to each other? 

In retrospect, she understood that she had been in a very straightforward way out of her mind with grief. But at the time it only seemed to her that the world was coming apart and she was falling through its cracks, with someone else’s infant in her arms.

It wasn’t, of course, and she wasn’t, and after a long time, she did cry herself out. And Flora woke, but softly, with only an ordinary little hungry cry, and her immediate animal need took over Caroline’s whole self long enough for her to feed her, and burp her, and ignore everything nightmarish about it. When sated Flora smiled and punched Caroline’s mouth and giggled at her grunt, Caroline kissed her and said ‘You are mine,’ a hoarse whisper, ‘you are, you’re mine, and I’m yours,’ over and over until, mercy of mercies, she fell asleep again. Caroline waited a moment for the strength to stand and set her gently down in Calamity’s old-fashioned bassinet, then turned to address the other needy animal in the room.

It was only then that the penny dropped. ‘Oh, Gillian,’ she said aloud.

She scrubbed her hands over her face and took a breath and started where she could, with picking up bottles. She moved slowly, all her muscles tensed with vigilance against the slightest sound. She tidied the lounge, set a massive mixing bowl on the floor next to Gillian’s head, then dragged the bassinet into the kitchen and prayed Flora wouldn’t wake again.

Autopilot took over, and she lost time. That happened now, sometimes. She’d look up from a task and find an hour had passed, or she’d come downstairs to a clean load of washing and have no recollection of having started it. Now, she shook her head and blinked, and found she’d done the pile of washing-up in the sink—at least a few days’ worth, was her diagnosis—and wiped down all the surfaces. She flung the tea towel in her hands over her shoulder and leaned against the counter, breathing carefully. She watched Flora, starfished in her sleep, her little elephant tucked under her arm. She made an angry swipe at her sudden tears, and set to foraging material for a good greasy hash, in the event that Gillian might ever want to eat again. She wondered, idly, when was the last time she herself had eaten. She couldn’t remember.

She was sitting on the floor in the lounge, watching vacantly as Flora fascinated herself with the concept of wiggling, when Gillian finally stirred. 

‘Hiya,’ she said softly, too sharply aware of her own intrusion.

‘Rmph,’ said Gillian, squinting. ‘What.’ 

‘I – thought I’d drop by,’ Caroline said, not quite able to lie. ‘And then I thought I’d better stay.’ 

‘What,’ Gillian said again, scrubbing the heel of her hand across her face.

Caroline stood cautiously and crossed the room to perch on the settee. Gillian struggled to sit up; Caroline laid a hand on her back. ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’ Gillian groaned and looked up at her from under her shaggy fringe. ‘I’ve done a bit of tidying up, I hope that’s all right. If you’d like me to go—’

‘Don’t,’ Gillian said abruptly, grasping her wrist. ‘Sorry, sorry, I – you don’t have to go.’ 

‘All right,’ Caroline said, and then pitched her over the side of the settee just in time for her to vomit directly into the bowl. ‘All right,’ she said again, very gently, her hand steady on Gillian’s shoulder. Gillian whimpered. ‘It’s all right,’ said Caroline, raking her fingers through Gillian’s hair, holding it back. ‘It’s all right.’ She couldn’t stop saying it. She hoped she didn’t sound hysterical. 

‘Sorry for the mess,’ Gillian said between convulsions. 

‘It’s all right,’ said Caroline, with no idea whether she meant it or not.

In any case, she sat it out, and by the time Flora began, inevitably, to kick off, she’d managed to convince Gillian of the value of a few bites of toast, and then a shower. She walked the baby up and down the lounge while she cried, then changed her, and fed her, and walked her around some more. She made a half-arsed effort at singing to her. She put her down so that she could tie her hair back, and she finally settled a little. ‘Well, now you’re just winding me up,’ she said, and refused to cry again. 

When Gillian came back down, she smiled wanly and said ‘Thanks, Caz,’ and lowered herself onto the ground beside Flora, who turned to gaze at her with interest and the occasional random yowl. ‘Everyone else buggered off yesterday morning and I—. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.’ It plainly cost her to talk, but she looked at Caroline with that lopsided narrow-eyed smile and Caroline felt something deep inside her shift, just a little.

Flora grabbed at Gillian’s face, and Gillian groaned, but that only made Flora laugh. ‘Oh yeah, missy? Smug old slag like your mum, I see.’

‘Oi,’ said Caroline. ‘Language.’ She almost smiled.

Gillian wagged a finger at her. ‘I’m the least of her problems in that department, love.’ She offered Flora the same finger, and gasped and grinned at her when she took it. ‘That’s a lovely elephant you’ve got there, petal,’ she said, a little wincingly, picking up the toy and making its trunk lift and dip, and Flora laughed again. The elephant shook as though with laughter of its own. She was very good at that, Gillian, even half dead.

‘Ginika made that for her,’ Caroline said, and managed not to choke on it. ‘She won’t have anything to do with anything else.’ 

‘ ’S’lovely,’ Gillian said to Flora, and then looked cautiously up at Caroline. ‘If she likes it… I could, I mean, not like it’s the same, but I could make her another, others, like that? Little knitted animals, like? If – if you — .’

‘You _knit_?’ The image was so preposterous that it was a moment before the tears caught up with her again. 

‘Hey, now. I’ve got loads of hidden talents, me,’ Gillian said, pitched for Flora, still captivated by her puppet show. Then she groaned again, tucking the toy into Flora’s arm, and hoisted herself up off the floor. ‘ ’Nother trip to the bog, I think,’ she said, with a little valiant humour behind her misery. She laid a hand on Caroline’s shoulder. ‘Don’t want to overstep, Caz. Just. If you want.’

‘Yeah,’ Caroline said absently, watching her make her ginger way up the stairs. 

It hadn’t once in twenty-seven days occurred to her that she could give Flora new toys, ones that hadn’t been made or bought before she was born. She swallowed the impulse to ask Kate’s permission. Flora reached for her, and Caroline gave her her hand. 

When Gillian came back downstairs, Caroline left the baby in her care, and went into the kitchen to see about that hash. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a room to herself.

* * *

She was better prepared for the next anniversary. Gillian had seen her through her own, her and Flora, and Greg for that matter, gotten Robbie and Raff to take Lawrence to the Lakes, and invited them all to the farm for the weekend. She and Ellie had looked after the girls, and Gillian’d surrendered her bed to Caroline. Caroline didn’t say that she’d have preferred to share it. 

She slept most of the weekend, keeping odd hours. She and Greg found each other in the kitchen at three in the morning the second night, and sat on the floor eating ice cream and crying and swapping stories neither of them had had the courage to look at for a year. It was then that she asked him to move in for good. She told Gillian about that, on the phone a few days later, thanked her for providing the space that had made it happen. ‘It’s nothing, love,’ Gillian had said. ‘You know I’ve always got room for you.’ 

Caroline was all the more determined to make up the favor to Gillian, but when she turned up at the farm on the morning of the second she found the house pristine. Gillian had put herself to bed, and if there were more bottles in her recycle bin than usual, Caroline wouldn’t know. 

‘Hiya, Caz,’ Gillian said, coming downstairs fully dressed, like she’d been expecting her. Never mind it was gone eleven. She hugged her and kissed both her cheeks. ‘How do?’ she asked, chipper and brittle. 

It was like that all day. Gillian fussed over her and made her tea and then lunch and then tea again and asked her a thousand questions, about work, about Flora and the boys and her embarrassing attempts at dating, and wouldn’t so much as acknowledge a ‘how are you’ until Caroline reached across the kitchen table and held onto her wrist and said ‘Gillian,’ as bluntly as she could. 

‘Me and Robbie’s gettin’ divorced,’ Gillian said, holding her gaze for a moment, and then extracted herself from Caroline’s grasp to tackle the washing up.

Caroline cleared the table, and took up a tea towel to do the drying, and lay a hand on Gillian’s shoulder that she only shrugged off with a tight smile. She’d withdrawn, and Caroline couldn’t reach her.

* * *

Year three, after a week of radio silence Gillian rang in the middle of the night to say in a slurred and unfamiliar voice that she’d done something very stupid. Caroline still wakes sometimes in a cold sweat from nightmares about those gruesome morning hours in A&E, clutching Gillian until she came round, weeping into her hair and whispering ‘don’t leave me, please don’t leave me’. The hospital staff had let her stay, she later learned, because in a fit of terror and confusion that she didn’t remember she’d claimed to be Gillian’s wife. Gillian would joke about that, afterward. Caroline never could.

* * *

It was easier after that, but then anything would have been. Gillian expected her; Caroline scheduled the around the date for months in advance. She brought food and cooked all day in Gillian’s kitchen. They watched crap telly. It didn’t feel so different from their usual anymore; they were always in and out of each other’s houses, doing things for each other’s kids, wrestling with their parents, tethered to each other every day by phonecalls and texts. But time needed marking, so they did it together.

‘Thank you, Caroline,’ Gillian said, as they sat together on her retaining wall, that uncannily warm day two years ago, watching the evening light fade over the hills. ‘For putting up with me.’

Caroline had learned, however slowly, how to react to that. She held Gillian’s hand for a moment and took a breath before she spoke. ‘You’re not something I put up with,’ she said, and she thought she’d managed to keep every trace of frustration out of her voice. Gillian looked up at her, that wide-open gaze of hers. It had taken her a long time, but Caroline had, finally, understood that life for Gillian really was one terrifying emergency defense posture after another, that she wasn’t being facetious when she said these things. And ‘thank you’ was after all an improvement on apologising for her existence. ‘I’m here because I want to be,’ she added, ‘because I love you.’ She wrapped an arm around Gillian’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head. ‘You know that.’ 

‘I do,’ Gillian said, looking down, fidgeting with the hem of Caroline’s jumper, ‘sometimes.’ She acknowledged the joke with a cautious little smile. ‘Just, I know I’m – I know I can be – a bit of a challenge, and I want you to know I do understand that, and I do appreciate you ss-sticking around, in spite of it.’ 

That’s Robbie’s bollocks, Caroline thought. Bastard. Not that he was the only one. Plenty of blame to go around there. ‘I could just murder everyone who’s ever said that to you, Gillian, I really could.’ She snapped her mouth shut and held her breath. Not, precisely, the best thing she could have said in the circumstances. But Gillian only laughed a dire little laugh. 

‘Yeah, I bet you would,’ she said. ‘You and me’d make a right pair.’ 

‘Thelma and Louise,’ Caroline suggested. Gillian snorted. 

‘Yeah, right. Long as I get to be Geena Davis.’ 

Caroline barked a laugh. You really had to hand it to Gillian, sometimes. ‘You’re definitely Geena Davis,’ she said. She squeezed her shoulders and kissed her again. ‘You’re not a challenge, Gillian, and you’re not trouble, and you’re not whatever else it is he s– – you think. All right?’

‘But – all right, but there’s no denying, is there, Caroline, that I’ve brought this th-thing into your life, and you have it to deal with every year, god, every day, and you wouldn’t, if I hadn’t, and I shouldn’t’ve, and I – I can only imagine how much you must hate it, me, for it.’ 

Caroline drew a sharp breath. ‘You know I don’t,’ she snapped. She knew Gillian didn’t mean to wound, but that made no difference. She felt it, physically, the way Gillian could change in an instant, like being blown about by a capricious wind—which was a terrible way of thinking of it. She waited for a moment, then turned to face her. ‘You _know_ I don’t,’ she said more carefully. ‘For all that you and I have – for all that things haven’t always been easy between us, surely you must know that I don’t _hate_ you, for this or anything else.’ She couldn’t quite keep the reproach out of her voice. Gillian looked up sheepishly at her, and perhaps being scolded made it easier for her to believe. Well, that was dangerous. 

She took another deep breath. ‘Of course, of _course_ I wish – wish it hadn’t happened, wish you’d never been put through what he put you through, wish you didn’t have it to carry around with you, and yeah, I do, I wish every day that I could take it from you, but it’s not – I don’t –.’ She’d run into a wall. She reached for Gillian’s hands and held them in both of hers, trying and failing to think her way past it. ‘I don’t know how to say it, Gillian, maybe one day I will but I don’t now, but the point is, darling, I’m here because I want to be.’ She raised Gillian’s hands to her lips and kissed her knuckles. ‘I’m here because I want to be.’ It struck her, as she repeated it, how true it was.

Gillian looked up at her for a moment, and then chuckled and said, ‘Right,’ like she didn’t quite believe her, or like she thought she was mad. But she folded her legs under her and leaned into Caroline’s shoulder, and didn’t let go of her hands.

* * *

Last year, Caroline brought Flora up to the farm with her, which seemed like a gamble, and Greg asking what was the worst that could happen hadn’t precisely reassured her. But ‘Seriously, Caroline,’ he’d said, leaning across the island and getting into her space, ‘has Gillian in fact ever actually let you down?’ She was going to owe him an apology for the way she responded to that, not least because he was right. She hadn’t, in fact, actually, not when it came to anything that mattered.

And she didn’t this time, either. Once she was fit to stand, Gillian showed Flora how to feed the chickens, laughing at the determined way she tossed the seed, and helped her build odd sophisticated structures with Calamity’s blocks while Caroline worked, or tried to. ‘Think this one’s a born engineer, Caz,’ Gillian smiled up at her from the floor, and then turned to Flora: ‘You gonna be a scientist like your mum?’ Four years on, that still made Caroline’s breath catch, hearing someone else refer to her like that so casually, like her most secret wish turning out, over and over again, to have been plainly manifest all along.

‘No, I want to have a real job,’ said Flora matter-of-factly, eyeing her next construction move carefully. Gillian shot Caroline a look, and she tried very hard not to laugh. But Flora wasn’t done. ‘I wanna _fix_ things and make things _better_ ,’ she said with her unfathomable earnestness. She placed the block and looked at Gillian. ‘Like _you_.’ 

It was how Caroline had explained to her, a few weeks since, why it was she liked to watch Gillian mess about with engines. Now she flushed, so filled up with feeling for the two of them and afraid she might cry, but Gillian didn’t look at her. ‘You’re a clever builder, kid, but you’ve no judgement of any kind,’ she said softly, and then, ‘Oohh, well done! What about this one?’, reimmersing herself in their project.

Naptime found all three of them piled in Gillian’s bed, wriggly Flora between them insisting against all evidence that she wasn’t sleepy. Gillian talked to her and teased her in just the same voice she used on rambunctious lambs, until she settled, a little, enough for Caroline to read to her. ‘Listen,’ Gillian whispered, with a sweet soft smile for Caroline. And Flora did. Caroline’d never learned that trick. She took a deep breath, and started reading. After a moment, she glanced sidelong at them, Gillian a protective coil around Flora, who held on fast to Caroline’s sleeve, looking up at her in rapt attention. Caroline stuttered, cleared her throat, and focused closely on the page. When Flora dozed off, she kept reading, just to see—yes. She felt Gillian’s weight shift, and heard her soft little sleeping wheeze. She smiled to herself as she set down _Swallows and Amazons_ and picked up _Tess of the d’Urbervilles_ , but it sat unopened on her lap while she watched them for a long time, her daughter asleep in the crook of Gillian’s arm, and both of them snoring. 

It was almost impossible to believe, how necessary they had both become. 

That night, when Caroline leaned in the doorway to Gillian’s bedroom to wish her goodnight, Gillian bit her lip and pulled back the duvet and looked at her so imploringly she couldn’t help laughing. But she crawled in beside her, and turned off the lamp, and when Gillian wouldn’t stop fidgeting and shifting, said ‘C’mere’ and pulled her close and stroked her hair until the tension went out of her. So Gillian fell asleep in her arms, and Caroline lay awake a long while, holding her and thinking: how impossible, how necessary.

* * *

It had, yes, gotten much easier. But always the morning was the same, Gillian dead to the world and starved and hungover and miserable when she woke, in need of coddling and care. So Caroline is surprised, this year, when she finds Gillian in the yard at half past seven, elbow-deep in the guts of her Land Rover’s engine. She’s got the bloody Breakfast Show on so loud she hasn’t heard Caroline pull in.

Caroline lingers for a moment, watching her, before she calls out and walks over. When Gillian looks up at her, she looks more or less herself. Tired, a little pale and a little thin, but steady, and lovely, and her smile is strong and genuine. She hops down off the wine crate she’s standing on and turns off the radio.

‘Hiya, Caz,’ she says. ‘Sorry, I’m—,’ she gestures. 

‘Don’t care,’ Caroline says, pulling her close. She’s given up worrying about a bit of sheep shit or engine oil long since. It takes a moment, but Gillian does lean in, a little, holding her hands well clear of Caroline’s clothes. Caroline kisses her temple. ‘Brought you breakfast. Well, things to make breakfast with. And every other meal for about nine years, probably.’ 

Gillian pulls back and smiles and shakes her head. ‘Yeah, all right,’ she says, looking at Caroline like she thinks she’s daft. ‘All right, you go on, just let me…’ she waves at the situation, whatever it is, under the Landie’s bonnet. ‘Kids are here,’ she calls after her.

Gillian’s always been alone on the farm for these wretched anniversaries—‘No one can stand to be near me,’ she’d say—but this morning Caroline finds Raff and Ellie in the kitchen engaged in a good-cop-bad-cop dispute with a half-dressed Calamity as to a matter involving a pair of trousers that Calam is waving above her head like a battle standard. 

‘Mrs Doctor Caroline!’ Raff exclaims, and stoops to kiss her cheek. He dwarfs her. It’s more than a little stupid, but that always makes her flush and smile. ‘Perfect timing.’

‘Caroline,’ Ellie says more sharply, ‘would you please explain to my daughter the necessity of being fully clothed in public?’ Ah. 

She addresses herself to Calam’s defiant pout in her sharpest Headmistress voice, the one that’s a parody of Gillian’s parody of her: ‘ _Miss Wallace_?’ That’s as far as she has to get before the girl’s sat herself on the floor to wrestle her way into her jeans with a fairly astonishing alacrity. Caroline laughs, Ellie issues a dramatic sigh and glares at her, half relief and half piercing envy, and Raff just grins. 

‘ ’Nother victory for Auntie Caz?’ Gillian taunts from the doorway, shinnying out of her coveralls with a broad smirk for her son. 

Before they can get too deep into the protracted piss-take that seems to be the core of their relationship, Caroline reaches up to grab Raff by the scruff. ‘Right, Raphael, come get all this crap out of my car for me.’ 

‘How many people d’you expect to be feeding?’ he asks as they stagger back to the house, heavily laden. 

‘Well, you and your mother, for a start,’ Caroline says, hipchecking the door open, and he has to acknowledge that she has a point. She persuades him and Ellie to stay for breakfast and enlists Ellie in the cooking, much as she’d prefer not to share it. The meal is loud, and boisterous, or the Greenwood side of the table is. Gillian telling an elaborate and likely mainly fictional story about an escaped sheep, doing her own voice and that of terrifying old MacAllister at the next farm over, a man Caroline has not ever actually laid eyes on. For Calam’s benefit, ostensibly, Raff does the voice of the sheep, which only makes Gillian choke laughing.

‘They’re all as bad as each other,’ Ellie mutters. She’s so serious and capable, it’s easy to forget sometimes that she’s still such a kid herself. All that earnestness will crush her, given the chance. Caroline drapes an arm around her shoulders and kisses her head. 

‘Takes a village, love, you know that,’ she says under the uproar. ‘And you’ve been at this long enough to know it’ll be a different story entirely in a fortnight.’ Ellie nods, looking up at her like her life depends on being able to believe her. Funny, Caroline thinks; she’d never wanted a daughter until she found herself all at once with more girls than she knew what to do with. ‘So!’ She kisses Ellie again, and runs her fingers through her lovely long hair. ‘Where’re you off to, then?’ She lets Ellie lean on her and addresses herself to Raff, whose laughter fades in the instant.

‘Sheffield,’ he says cautiously. ‘Meeting… meeting Robbie for Sunday, well, Monday dinner.’ He looks sidelong at his mother, who averts her gaze, picking at the remains of her toast. 

‘Ah,’ Caroline says. Her blood runs suddenly cold. ‘Well.’ She really would gladly kill him, Robbie, with her bare hands, another good April Fool, but even setting that aside, there’s such a thing as loyalty, she thinks. An awkward hush has fallen over the table. She gives Ellie one more squeeze and says ‘Right!’ and there’s a clatter of chairs as everyone stands at once. They leave more abruptly than they need to, in a tense hubbub of awkward half-spoken reassurances. For all that, Caroline makes a point of hugging the lad; he doesn’t know, after all, what she does, and he has enough shadows on his heart. He clasps her tightly; it surprises her. 

‘I’m so glad she has you,’ he says, a fierce whisper against her ear. She lets him cling to her as long as he wants.

She and Gillian are left with the washing up, and the sudden quiet. Caroline knows better, now, than to try to break into Gillian’s tense, frenetic silence. The way the quiet grows around them, taking on form as they move through the deep familiar patterns of sharing this space, through the slanting light, relieves her of the need to speak. And it takes some of the tension out of Gillian’s shoulders.

‘Thought we could go for a walk,’ Gillian says eventually, shaking her fringe out of her eyes with a venturesome smile, handing Caroline the final frying pan to dry. 

‘Sure, yeah, good,’ Caroline says, watching her carefully. After a moment she decides to risk it. ‘You seem remarkably…’ 

Gillian cuts her off with a glare. ‘Yeah?’ She softens at the look on Caroline’s face. ‘Sorry.’ She scrubs out the sink with a fierce narrow focus, but after a moment looks up at Caroline again. ‘I am sorry.’ 

Caroline waves it off. ‘Nope, shouldn’t have asked.’ Sharper than she wanted, and it sticks in her throat. Sometimes she feels like she’s getting absolutely nowhere. She focuses closely on balancing the pan in the rack. 

‘ _Fifteen years_ , Caroline.’ Gillian chucks the dishrag at the sink, then slumps against the counter. ‘I’m done. I’m just ff-fucking done.’ 

‘Okay.’ No point arguing. She reaches for Gillian’s hand, squeezes her fingertips. ‘Shall we, then?’

‘Yeah.’ Gillian’s smile is startlingly gentle.

They take a familiar route, down across the river and back up again. Caroline still can’t hop a stile without thinking of Gillian giving her no end of shit, years ago, for not knowing her arse from a bridleway. She’d hauled her all over the place giving her geography lessons, making her map the valley from the top of Blackshaw Head, from Stoodley Pike, and on one truly ridiculous afternoon, blind drunk at the top of Wainhouse Tower, turning her by the shoulders and taking the piss, til Caroline thought she could walk from Sowerby Bridge to Todmorden and back with her eyes closed. She couldn’t, of course. The one time she’d tried a little outing on her own, she’d walked in circles around Hardcastle Crags in the rain for ages. ‘There’s _one_ path!’ Gillian howled, when she’d told her. ‘It’s practically a road!’ Well, that wasn’t quite true, Caroline objected. ‘Lost in the wilds of a National Trust park,’ Gillian tutted, shaking her head. ‘Can’t leave you alone for five minutes.’ It had been worth a few hours of sodden misery, Caroline thought, for the glee it gave her.

Today is dim and wet, and the wind is bitter as they climb out of the valley on the long path up to Norland Moor. But it’s kept the holiday ramblers away, and Caroline enjoys the possessive feeling she has about Gillian’s possessive feeling for the landscape, enjoys having them both to herself. Reaching the top is always a little bit like letting a dog off a lead—Ladstone Rock is Gillian’s favourite destination, though Caroline finds it gruesome, whether or not anyone ever really was flung from it eight hundred years ago. That, of course, is part of why Gillian loves it, that and making Caroline squirm with her detailed horror stories of sacrifices and executions, most of which, Caroline thinks, she’s probably invented herself. 

Today she offers nothing on that subject, but while Caroline’s still catching her breath, pushing her mist-damp hair out of her eyes and blinking in the stinging wind, Gillian clambers out onto the rock, casting her gaze out over the fog lying low along the river, shadowing the forest. She stands on the edge with her hands on her hips, the wind whipping her hair out of its ponytail, looking like she belongs to the landscape—the varicolored hills in the struggling sunlight, rich green farmland and the moors’ muted heather and brushed gold. The restless vastness of the sky. So much bleak and quiet beauty.

‘Why does anyone live anywhere else in the world!’ Gillian shouts, looking back at Caroline with a wild grin. High on endorphins, presumably, but she says that every time. Not that Caroline doesn’t share the feeling. She tried to leave, after all, more than once, and never managed to make it stick. 

‘Get down from there,’ she says, more sharply than she meant to, but that precipice makes her dizzy.

Gillian laughs and spreads her arms and throws her head back, and Caroline has to look away. ‘Not funny,’ she calls.

‘Sorry, Caz,’ Gillian says, though she plainly isn’t, as she hops back down onto the sandy track. ‘Hey.’ She reaches out for Caroline’s arm, looking much more contrite.

‘It is a hell of a thing,’ Caroline concedes by way of forgiveness, looking out again. Gillian turns to look with her, and after a moment, leans back against her. 

‘Yeah,’ she murmurs. They stand for a long while, watching the swift changes of the sky. Caroline bets on rain; Gillian rolls her eyes like that’s the most foolish thing she’s ever heard.

Caroline edges a little closer to her, and speaks softly. ‘It’s all right if you’re not, you know. Done.’ Gillian flinches, and Caroline lays her arms across her shoulders. ‘It’s all right if next year is a shitshow,’ she says, kissing the crown of her head. ‘Or the next year after that, or the tenth. I know it’s exhausting but it’s—. We’ll get through it.’

‘We?’ Gillian says, with a rueful little laugh. 

‘Well, fair enough, but—well, yeah. We.’ She kisses her hair again. Gillian breathes a great deep shuddering breath. 

‘You shouldn’t have to do this anymore, either.’ She exhales. ‘I can’t stand it, Caroline, knowing it’s dragging you down, too.’

‘That’s not,’ Caroline says softly, ‘that’s not how I feel about it.’ She drops her arms to wrap them around Gillian’s waist and hold her close, cheek to cheek. Gillian folds her arms over Caroline’s, grasps them tightly. ‘You do know that.’ She hesitates. It all seems so fragile, suddenly, the two of them alone out on this blasted heath. So fragile, and so inestimably precious. ‘What I—,’ she starts, then takes a breath, and tries again. ‘I feel lucky, Gillian, I know that might sound absolutely mad to you but I really do. And I am, I’m lucky that I get to be this close to you, lucky to have your trust, and it’s, you didn’t, you.’ She sniffs and presses her face into the warm woollen curve of Gillian’s shoulder, tightening her hold on her. ‘You survived, Gillian, that’s all that matters to me, you’re here, and I want you here, I need you here. I couldn’t be without you.’ It comes out in a rush, a hoarse cry by the end, muffled against Gillian’s jumper. Gillian is tense and silent and still, with that killing grip on Caroline’s wrists; Caroline just holds on.

In the middle distance a kestrel hovers over the river. Caroline knows Gillian’s watching her, how she holds herself perfectly still in midair, a calculated tour de force of watchful suspension. Then she dives. ‘Oh,’ Gillian says softly, and Caroline has to close her eyes again. Finally Gillian shifts and softens a little and cranes her neck to look up at her. Caroline kisses her forehead, and she closes her eyes and leans into it. Slowly, carefully, she turns in Caroline’s arms, to meet her gaze with an inscrutable little smile. She reaches to brush Caroline’s hair back with her fingertips, and then leans up and kisses her. Just once, one small, chaste kiss, and very soft. When she pulls back, she holds Caroline’s gaze for a moment. The wind whips her hair across her face. 

Then she eases out of Caroline’s grasp, squeezes her hand. ‘Right,’ she says, and sets off back down the path. The kestrel climbs again and lingers, hanging still in midair in the clear bright wind over the moortops. Caroline watches her for a moment before catching up with Gillian. Neither of them speaks, the whole walk home. And Gillian was right; it doesn’t rain.

* * *

Gillian snaps awake at dawn. She holds herself very still. The weight in the bed next to her, the weight across her body. She breathes very carefully. Then she remembers: Caroline. She exhales. It’s Caroline, in her bed with her, Caroline’s warmth against her back, and Caroline’s arm pale and lovely across her waist. She rolls over very carefully, not that she could wake her if she tried, and studies her shape in the dim morning light. Her hair fallen across her face, her face smashed into the pillow. The duvet kicked half off her, and her t-shirt rucked up, baring the curve and crease of her waist. Freckled, like the rest of her. Gillian doesn’t let herself look too long at that. Her beautiful broad hand lays open on the pillow. Gillian locks her fingers into Caroline’s, and holds fast. 

It seems so unlikely. 

Unlikely in the first place that there should be someone in her bed who is not a colossal mistake. Unlikely that it should be Caroline, and unlikely that Caroline should be her friend at all, much less the kind of friend you kiss on the mouth and invite to share your bed. Like that’s a normal thing for two grown women to be doing. She hears Caroline’s voice in her head, repeating the word _lucky_. And then Caroline’s smile across the kitchen last night, as they cooked quietly together. Caroline warm against her back as she fell asleep. Caroline’s face brushed pink by the wind that scours Norland Moor. Caroline’s soft lips. 

Caroline here in her bed now. The moment sharpens to a point, in the bright spring morning light. Sharpens, and at the same expands, takes in all the years between them. Gillian thinks of that night, it seems so long ago, so much more than half a decade, talking with Caroline by firelight, telling her things. She didn’t use to be able to think about it. She can, now. Caroline in the firelight, and how Gillian had had the feeling that Caroline might be beginning to like her, and how much she couldn’t stand that. How Caroline had held her hand. And then she’d stayed. Every time Gillian expected her not to, then and thereafter, she had stayed.

And Caroline is still here, in her bed, now. It’s the third of April, and Caroline is here. Gillian turns Caroline’s hand in hers, presses it to her lips.

Caroline stirs. Gillian thumbs her knuckles and watches her slow climb into consciousness. Her furrowed brow, her squint, the deep impressions of the pillow on her skin, the way the sunlight falls across her. The slightly squished shape of her mouth. Gillian brushes her fingertips across her cheek, tucking back the lock of hair that’s stuck there. 

‘Morning,’ she says, resting her hand in Caroline's hair. 

Caroline blinks and smiles at her, a slow and lovely thing. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Hello.’


End file.
